The present invention relates generally to gripping heads and is more particularly concerned with an extensible head of variable configuration allowing the seizing and reorienting of groups of objects, such as for example bottles, flasks or the like having to be encased or uncased.
There are already known extensible heads allowing the gripping and modifying of a group of bottles. Such known heads comprise generally a plurality of seizing members mounted on a frame and adapted for example to uncase one or several groups of bottles to convey and thereafter release the same at the desired place, for example onto a conveyor.
However, no gripping heads have hitherto been proposed that are capable of reorienting the bottles of the group of bottles, after the latter has been seized in, for example, a carton or like cardboard box, or in a case.
Now reorientation of the bottles resulting from their rotation about a vertical axis may be particularly useful in the case of, for example, bottles or flasks of oval section. Indeed, in this particular case, the bottles have two transverse axes of different lengths, and it is desirable that, when the bottles are released onto a conveyor, the transverse axis of greater length be parallel to the direction of movement of the conveyor, otherwise the bottles or flasks may overturn. This is why the bottles seized by the gripping head often have to be reoriented before being put down on the conveyor. But such reorientation may also be necessary in the case of ordinary round-section bottles that have to be deposited on the conveyor in a definite angular position with respect to the longitudinal axis of the conveyor.
Such, therefore, is the problem set and solved by the present invention which provides an extensible head of particularly simple mechanical design allowing a group of seized bottles to be deposited according to a definite orientation.